Microsoft CEO is driving data-culture mindset

(Phys.org) —Microsoft's future strategy: is all about leveraging data, from different sources, coming together using one cohesive Microsoft architecture. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Tuesday, both in a blog posting and Microsoft event in San Francisco, talked about the data-culture direction the company is taking, expounding on what it means to become a data-centric business culture today when supported by a nicely comprehensive technology suite of tools and services from Redmond. Fundamentally, the message is that companies can be successful if they recognize how to leverage data they already have, whether from structured or unstructured data, using technology from Microsoft.

"SQL Server, BI, Machine Learning, Bing, Azure each have a vital role to play on the road to creating a world in which our devices, services and environments truly anticipate and understand our needs," he said. Analytic tools should be within the grasp of everyday users. "We believe that with the right tools, insights can come from anyone, anywhere, at any time. When that happens, organizations develop what we describe as a 'data culture,'" Nadella said in the Tuesday blog. The challenge was to get the kind of technology that "can understand context, derive intent and separate signal from noise."

Nadella on Tuesday also had some news. SQL Server 2014 was announced; the release brings in-memory capability to all workloads – OLTP, Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence.

The second annoucement was Analytics Platform System (APS). APS combines Microsoft's SQL Server database and Hadoop technology in one offering. (VentureBeat explained what this means: SQL Servers don't need to work on their own. With Microsoft's Analytics Platform System, "you can run queries across both traditional relational data warehouses and unrelational data stored in Hadoop. So you could, for example, query data from transactional and log systems alongside real-time data from social streams and websites. Microsoft calls it 'big data in a box.'"

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Bringing the Internet of Things to the London Underground

Azure Intelligent Systems Service was announced as a cloud-based service to connect, manage, capture and transform machine-generated data regardless of operating system or platform. This is an Internet of Things cloud service that went into limited beta Tuesday.

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